They Would Still Have Been Scalping Each Other

This friend of mine is an older woman, with always a smile and a kind word for everyone. She is well educated and a person of god. Her beaming matronly presence is very comforting, which is why the following experience veritably shook me up. I was visiting with her on her family farm in a one horse town in rural Minnesota when this happened.

I started to tell her about how Native Indians in Hawaii were starting litigation to claim their land in the Black Hills of Dakota back because under Hawaii law they were no longer entitled to affirmative action and were getting increasingly marginalised by mainland Americans there. In South Dakota there has been aggressive opposition to this public interest litigation. The federal and State administrations were endorsing local response claiming that it was highly racial and discriminatory on the part of Native Americans to want to remove people from their lands on grounds of ancestral ownership.
If permitted it would set dangerous precedents in the US.
The settler families offered equally valid reasons for not wanting to move. It was our grandfathers who made this place liveable. How can we be expected to leave?
Who can deny the logic at work here, especially since the Native Americans cannot boast of illustrious ancestry.

Normally i desist from sharing such information but having heard my friend talk so often of justice for oppressed communities, knowing about her annual olive picking trips to Jerusalem, and her faith, i sincerely believed that she would want to know about this development.

There right in front of my eyes a most amazing thing happened. As in a special effects movie the benign florid face metamorphosed into a featureless blotch of skin and a livid voice said “All of you (all of who?) think we Americans are fools. We are not. What we have is what we deserve. Nowhere else on earth is a conquering race required to return what they have conquered but the whole world accuses America of usurping and wants us to give back what we have rightfully won”.

It is difficult to describe the experience I had of descending into a bottomless vacuum of self righteous rage and arrogance as she continued, “And where would they have been if we hadn’t come along and taught them better? Still scalping each other as they had always been doing, is where.”

i dragged my transfixed gaze away from her distorted visage to the wall length charcoal on canvas sketch of a native healer that enjoyed pride of place in her room and started rapidly thinking of some way to end the conversation and get the hell out of there before my bile could ruin her native rugs!

It took several weeks for my mind gallery to recover her familiar friendly face.